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I think it goes without saying that the goal (here) in making a "generic" tasbot would be to make something that can be tuned to any particular game in order to achieve performance as if it had been written specifically for that game, without actually needing a full reprogramming for each game. (Or, at least, simplifying that reprogramming as much as possible.) It's either that or making something with amazingly good AI... Anything that needs to try 4^(movie length) combinations is unworkable and isn't being seriously considered.
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Maybe true, but if those movies had had watermarks, I bet they would still have been obscured or altered somehow, and meanwhile everyone that watches the real AVI has to see that continually-present watermark.
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Halamantariel wrote:
the only way to steal in the future if we used this technique would be to re-encode the movies ...
But isn't that exactly what these people have done? They must have re-encoded the movie in order to add their own watermarks, remove the introductory text, and hide or replace any other text that's displayed during the movie. (I'm talking about the Mario64 and Arkanoid ones.)
[EDIT: Oh, you meant that kind of re-encoding, going back to the emulator. In that case, then no, they could in fact steal it without doing that even if there's a watermark on it.]
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Xkeeper wrote:
nitsuja wrote:
Wouldn't it be easier to decide on some functions you'll need and put them in a few emulators, instead of interfacing with the emulator by poking around in its memory without its knowledge?
If you had bothered to read the thread, you would've found that he doesn't want to do that, to keep the whole "Universal" feel.
Simply updating some memory addresses is infinitely easier than downloading the source of every emulator, adding functions and correctly placing them in the proper format fo rtht emulator, and then recompiling them for each OS.
Don't assume I haven't read the thread. I'm claiming that "updating some memory addresses" is actually much more difficult than adding those functions to each emulator. Mainly because he does not really know where those addresses are (except where they happen to be at the time on his computer), and because providing input at the correct speed by editing the emulator's memory while it's running would be nearly impossible and would need to be re-written per emulator. It would be easier to make a universal interface for the emulators to "plug in" to.
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Wouldn't it be easier to decide on some functions you'll need and put them in a few emulators, instead of interfacing with the emulator by poking around in its memory without its knowledge?
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Savestate would be unacceptable for publishing. Cheat code would only be acceptable if it's simply an in-game password. Otherwise, battery file (start-from-SRAM) has the best chance of being accepted, because you can provide the from-power-on movie of yourself unlocking (super) hard mode as easily-verifiable proof that you used the same SRAM it created.
Of course, the resulting movie has to be more entertaining than the existing TAS of this game to even be considered.
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Oh yeah, this thread. New on my wish list is: River City Random (EX)
The game has a "crazy" difficulty and a "speed" option to turn up a bit. Hidden attacks were added to the normal controls so there should be more variety. Slam dunking construction cones is surprisingly effective. Jumping through the air is faster, there should be more acrobatics. No left+right glitches, apparently, and Moose can't be skipped, but he can be tricked into diving into a pit.
Overall, a run of it would be significantly different from the original, more than different enough to warrant being done, and the result would be quite fast-paced.
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EDITED: Uh, not that I know of, I guess.
There is a newer (official) Snes9x version in the works, which is not quite ready yet, but it will certainly be linux-friendly and it will incorporate much of the improvement9 changes (and, incidentally, fixes for all of the problems/suggestions that I see posted on this page).
If anyone cares, I am discontinuing the "Snes9x improvement" branch. It will be replaced by the next official release of Snes9x, except for the purposes of playing existing movies.
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mwl wrote:
Once you've provided the last input, stop recording as soon as you can, preferably on the next frame. Any extraneous frames will inflate your final time, and you don't want that.
But some people had problems with m64 movies ending on playback before the last input they recorded, so make sure to save a savestate and load it again after making the last input you want in the movie, before you stop recording.
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It is really entertaining, but the times you walked diagonally instead of jumping (while you had the feather equipped) are becoming increasingly noticeable as mistakes.
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Less Ashamed Of Self wrote:
2nd, this memory error that was run into twice... can anyone post some screenshots of what it looks like as opposed to us d/ling and running through the smv's? Thanks.
Screenshots wouldn't help. In the first one, the game suddenly freezes during a teleport, and in the second one, it freezes when the screen fades to black to show a scene (which would make for quite a creepy ending). I'm more curious as to what they did in the first place that caused the memory error which they had to redo so much to avoid, and how they tracked it down.
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Vatchern wrote:
Nitsuja: i have tried to get that criticle hit of yours to work many times, but came up unsucessful.
I think what actually happened is that the boss hit himself with a weapon he threw. That can do enormous damage (like, on the order of 32 HP sometimes). He was right against a wall (that I was inside) when I was trying to hit him so that would explain me not seeing him get hit by the projectile. The weapon he had at the time was a glitched-out baseball, I don't think that matters but it might.
EDIT: Also, if you look at my glitched playaround, you'll see that I hit the boss a few times while in the glitched state. I would check the memory to see if any of those hits did more damage than usual.
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What it should really do is just save the state of the DMA transfer like other emulators do. I don't know why it doesn't, though, so maybe there is some complication making that difficult.
But, going with what you have it doing right now, at least it should fast-forward until it can save and automatically save before loading if you hit load before it can save.
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upthorn wrote:
My solution was that if you hit save-state during a DMA transfer, it will set a flag that makes it save the state as soon as the transfer finishes in the course of normal emulation.
The downside is that this can cause the state to save a frame or so after the button is pressed.
What if you load a state immediately after saving while the game is paused? (Which is a very common thing to do.) That solution won't work very well.
EDIT: oops, didn't mean to edit
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upthorn wrote:
Truncated wrote:
2) I sometime get an annoying "Warning: Saving during DMA transfer; savestate may be corrupt." and it won't go away for several saves. I haven't looked into it more.
I have gotten rid of this, but I'm not sure if this unfixed the problem nitsuja fixed by implementing it.
If the game is doing a DMA transfer when you save, Gens causes the DMA transfer to magically finish before saving, which seems likely to cause weird desyncs because it means that the act of saving the game changes the state of the game. I added that warning as a "possible desync alert". Maybe it should be optional?
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Maybe it's a manually-tallied poll?
I also vote for "whatever's fastest", which is hard to tell. The run could potentially be a total glitchfest, will 2 players help with that enough to make up for the lag? (Maybe: Besides the suicide glitch for outside of boss fight rooms, using left+right to turn one player invisible will eliminate the lag from that player.)
As far as non-glitched attacks, the most damaging things by far seem to be: tricking the boss into hitting itself, throwing something while running (and jumping?), and throwing the boss. Bashing away at the bosses with 1 or 2 players could be the least effective way of fighting.
EDIT: Actually, has anybody considered the GBA remake?
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I think the 'h' in [hIRff] means it's a hacked ROM, which is bad, movies for hacked ROMs usually aren't accepted. You should get a ROM that isn't hacked and use that instead.
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blackshellbowser wrote:
However, please note: the rom I used was (and I swear it was) called:
"Pokemon Sapphire.gba".
The zip folder was simply called "PokemonSapphire".
"Pokemon Sapphire.gba" is not a standard ROM name. So, what you should do is download GoodGBA and tell it to rename your ROMs. Then it should become something like "Pokemon Sapphire (U) [!].gba", maybe with a number in front, and that's the ROM name to use.
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Baxter wrote:
Adding a third rating like this, will only give the popular games a higher average grade, while they are possibly overrated already.
But he didn't say anything about the familiarity level counting toward the overall grade. If anything, it would make more sense for it to alter how much the technical rating counts for (which could in fact decrease the overall rating), instead of adding to the rating directly.
